Brave New World
by DaughterofLuthien
Summary: When SG-1 gets word of another goa'uld loose on Earth, they make it their mission to take it down, only to discover too late that, not only isn't it a goa'uld, but they're not the only ones hunting it.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N – This is my first time writing a story for Supernatural, a show which I've only recently become interested in. As a result, I really hope my characterization for the Winchesters will be okay. If it's not, please let me know! Also, this story is set near the beginning of S3 for SPN and somewhere in the middle of S4 for SG-1, just after the episode "The Curse." I guess that's all you really need to know, so… Enjoy!**

**Oh, and just to make it clear, I don't own anything. Ever. Much as I wish I did… **

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><p>12:43.<p>

Dr. Janet Frasier ran her fingers through her hair as she glanced at the clock once again. She stifled a yawn, and her eyes ached from reading and re-reading same three files multiple times over the course of the past two and a half hours. _What am I still doing here, anyways?_ she thought wearily_. I promised Cassie I'd be home by 10 tonight, I should have left hours ago. She might just kill me if I put off movie night again..._

It wasn't the first time that night that those thoughts had crossed her mind. There wasn't anything particularly pressing that was keeping her, either: no emergencies had popped up recently, both teams currently offworld were on very friendly planets, and only five people were in the infirmary, none of them seriously injured. And no one could deny that she could do with a little time off, especially after last week's little Egypt excursion. But still, despite everything reason told her, she had stayed in her office, watching through her open door as the night-shift nurses quietly went about their duties. It was actually peaceful, she realized.

Too peaceful.

It was just a gut feeling, really, but after working at the SGC for five years, she had learned to trust those. Something very bad was about to go down, and she needed to be there to clean up the mess.

Still, there was always a chance she could be wrong. And if she was, there was no way on this earth that she was going to be sitting in that chair all night, no matter how ergonomic it was supposed to be. She would give it another 17 minutes, she decided. If nothing had happened by then, she was going to go home to her daughter and her very comfortable bed, even if the powers of hell itself conspired to stop her.

The words had barely come to her mind, when she was interrupted by very sound that she had been expecting all night. The klaxons and alarms alerted her to a medical emergency, and she leaped out of her seat, all the weariness vanishing from her body as a new surge of adrenaline coursed through her veins. Grabbing what few supplies she could find at hand, she ran out the door, her slightly smudged lab coat flying behind her.

Still running as fast as she could, Janet made her way along the long corridor toward the elevator. She had barely gotten it in her sights when the door opened, revealing seven very worried-looking people accompanying a gurney. As always when faced with a situation like this, she breathed a small prayer for the safety of her friends. She would never dream of wishing pain and injury on anyone, of course, but she hated that feeling she got in the pit of her stomach, like she had just eaten something rather disagreeable, when she saw someone she was close to lying on one of her beds. Thankfully, however, she recognized four of the people exiting the elevator as the members of SG-1, obviously distraught, but physically fine.

She thanked God for small blessings.

General Hammond approached the team, striding in quickly from somewhere in the direction of his office. That was no surprise, as he would have been informed of the emergency at the same time that she had been. "Someone want to tell me what exactly happened out there?" he asked, his voice urgent.

Teal'c answered for the team. "The situation did not proceed as planned, General Hammond."

"He means we screwed up, sir," Colonel O'Neill clarified rather unhelpfully, his voice bitter.

"Where's SG-5?" This question was directed toward Colonel.

"They didn't make it."

There was a long pause as the full implication of those words sank in, and the General's face grew even more somber. Janet knew how much he hated losing good men in this war. His often rough exterior belied the fact that he cared for every single man and woman under his command as if they were his own. And Dave Hagert had been one of the best, Janet had been rather fond of him herself. He had even asked her out for drinks once. Of course she had refused, regulations and all that, but part of her had wondered if maybe, in a different situation...

General Hammond's voice shook her out of her reverie. "Well, what about the goa'uld?" he asked, all business once again. There would be time to mourn the lost team later, but they all still had a job to do. He had to make sure that the threat to Earth was neutralized. "Did it escape?"

"Wasn't a goa'uld!" Daniel answered, his tone revealing his exasperation with this impromptu debriefing.

Janet's saw her own confusion reflected on the General's face. "Well, then, what?"

"I, I, it-" The archeologist made some sort of 'flying and disappearing' motion with his hands in lieu of a coherent explanation. "It just..." But he didn't seem to know how to finish the sentence and trailed off, obviously at a loss for words.

"No idea, sir," Carter explained, her voice husky as a result of trying to hold back the tears that threatened to fall at any moment. "We've got no idea."

Janet's mind reeled from the information. Four people dead and another injured by some unknown creature that had somehow found its way outside the base? She desperately wanted to know more, but she caught sight of the gurney already being wheeled toward the infirmary by the two nurses, and her mind snapped back into doctor mode. She had a job to do as well, and at this moment her job was to save this man's life.

She broke into a run to keep up with the gurney, pushing aside a man in civilian clothing who was hovering much too close to the bed for her to get any work done. He yelled something at her, but she was too focused on the job at hand to pay any attention to him.

One glance at the injured man told her that he was in bad shape. His face was contorted in pain, and copious amounts of sweat had plastered much of his hair to his forehead. Not military, she thought to herself, noting the haircut, and filed the information away for later. One of the nurses had already set up an IV and was currently putting pressure on a very bloody wound too close to the man's heart than Janet was strictly comfortable with, a task that didn't seem very easy, given the amount that the man was thrashing. "What've we got?" she asked urgently as she ran alongside.

She was answered by the second nurse, the one deftly steering the gurney toward the infirmary. "Male. Mid 20s. Multiple gunshot wounds to the chest."

"He's lost a lot of blood," the first nurse supplied, rather pointlessly, as it was all too obvious just how much blood had been lost by the young man.

"Yeah, I can see that. Keep that pressure on it, please!" Janet tried not to let the irritation she was feeling creep into her voice, but was afraid that she was failing rather spectacularly. So she turned her attention instead to the man lying on the little bed. Most people would have been screaming from the sheer magnitude of pain that he must have been experiencing, but she saw that he had his jaw clenched tight to prevent exactly that. Despite not being in the military, this man was no stranger to pain.

Every now and then, a few moaned words would escape from his clenched teeth, but she could never quite make them out. A name, perhaps, but she couldn't be sure. She grabbed his hand in what she hoped was a comforting gesture. "Hey, you're going to be fine. Look at me," she commanded gently, trying to distract him a little from the pain. "Look at me!"

The man's green eyes focused on hers.

"Everything's going to fine, okay? Just take it easy. Now, can you tell me your name?"

It wasn't a long name, but she could see that the pain was making it difficult for him to form the word. "S- Sam," he finally grunted, breathing heavily.

"Well, you're doing great, Sam. But right now I need you to relax, okay?" She smiled reassuringly, willing him to trust her and believe that everything was going to be fine. She only hoped that it wasn't a lie. "Relax, and let me do my job. Can you do that for me?"

He nodded, and she was pleased to see that he was making a visible effort to control his thrashing.

"Good. You're going to be fine, Sam." Without thinking about it, she flashed the young man her most comforting smile, the one she usually reserved for Cassie and the patients she didn't think she could save. But this patient bore the singular trait of not belonging in either catagory. He most definitely wasn't her snarky, fifteen year old, adopted daughter, yet at the same time she was certain that she would be able to save him. Or at least she was almost certain.

Another pained groan forced its way through the clenched jaw of the injured man, effectively dispelling those sorts of thoughts as the doctor fished through the pockets of her coat for the hypodermic she had placed there earlier. "You're going to be fine," she muttered, more to herself this time than to the patient, the last word muffled as she removed the cap of the syringe with her teeth. With a practiced hand, she injected the contents into the thin tube connected to his IV, sending the sedative coursing through his veins.

The drug worked its magic within minutes, and by the time Dr. Fraiser and her team rolled the gurney through the doors of the infirmary, Sam Winchester's pained gasps had mellowed into a steadier rythem, signifying that he was finally, mercifully, fast asleep.

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><p><strong>AN - Sorry for how short this was, but I was trying to set it up sort like a normal SG-1 teaser... Next update will be longer, I promise! Please review, constructive criticism is always helpful! **


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N - Thanks to everyone who waited so long for me to continue this, and I'm sorry about my horrible laziness. *sheepish grin* Also, since I'm sure there'll be some confusion, _THIS IS NOT THE ORIGINAL CHAPTER TWO_. During the long time it took for me to update, I reworked some of the aspects of the story, including changing the timeline a bit. Unfortunately, this kinda had to come before the SG-1 stuff. Sorry. :/**

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><p><strong>-24 Hours Earlier-<strong>

_Dark._

_Darkness and night and the oppressive stench of blood. Half-decomposed. Rotting. It surrounded him, and he felt it thick in his nose and mouth, like a monster hell-bent on choking out every single thing in the room that could be considered anything less than pure evil._

_Screams pierced the heavy air. Horrible, gut-wrenching, familiar screams. One. And another. And another still. Three in quick succession, and they didn't stop. _

_Wouldn't ever stop._

_The screams came from a body that lay close by, close enough to touch if he could move. A body as dead as the blood that pooled around it._

_Dead by his own hand._

_Dead. Lifeless. Eyes wide, but staring at nothing._

_And still the screams refused to stop: some of his name, some unintelligible and almost inhuman-_

_-No, that wasn't right, they were all of his name now. And not pained and tortured either. Insistent. Faded. Slowly yet irresistibly overtaken by a comfortably familiar rumble..._

"Sam!"

A sharp whack to his left shoulder finally startled the younger Winchester awake, and after a rather lengthier than usual moment of complete confusion, he realised that he was in the Impala with his brother. Safe. No screams, no blood. Everything was right and normal and just as it should be.

Except it wasn't, not really. Thinking back on the events of the past few weeks, Sam remembered that nothing was really right at all.

Instinctively, he glanced over at his brother, though not before having the presence of mind to feign an attitude of annoyance at the rude awakening. After all, that was the sort of attitude that Dean would expect. It felt easy and normal and right when nothing else was, and would bother him far less than any show of concern on Sam's part. "What?"

Dean grinned over at him, appropriately and reassuringly oblivious. "That must've been some dream you were having there. It took me a whole three miles to get you awake enough to realize I existed, let alone move. And even then you were doing that thing with your shoulders - you know, like you used to do when you were little and didn't want to get up?" He shook his head and chuckled. "Man, you were cute."

Sam glared. Now annoyed in earnest, he was beginning to feel a little more like himself, and a little less like the helpless, haunted thing he had been in his nightmare.

And it _was_ a nightmare. It _had_ to be a nightmare, and not just because he wanted it to be. Two years of the horrible, painful things had taught him what visions felt like, and this wasn't it. He had known from the beginning, really - and also not until he had woken up, yet another sign that it was perfectly normal manifestation of his freakishly messed up subconscious - but it felt too _wrong _to be a vision. Like it was too vivid, yet also too impossible.

No, not impossible, that was the wrong word.

Unreal.

Because the possibility that such a scenario might actually occur was far too real for Sam to care to imagine.

He pushed the thought from his mind. Regardless of word choice, the fact still remained that the horrifically vivid thing that he had just experienced was simply a dream. A bloody, terrifying, gut-wrenching dream, granted - one of the worst he had experienced since he was a kid - but nothing more. He had taken enough Psych classes back at Stanford to know that nightmares were simply the unconscious mind's response to fear. They weren't prophecies, warnings, or portents of things to come.

If you were careful, the things in nightmares never had to happen.

He shook his head, and tried to focus on the being-annoyed-at-Dean. Rather unsurprisingly, this was far less difficult than he might have imagined. "Yeah, well," he countered, "three miles isn't actually that long a time when you're pushing 90." He yawned and tried to arrange his long limbs into something a little closer to a sitting position.

Dean's only response was to step a little harder on the accelerator, coaxing the Impala faster and faster down the empty highway. As Sam watched, the mountains and low, scattered bushes of eastern Utah rushed past at an ever-increasing pace, eventually melting into a single dark blur and blending into the night. Ever so briefly, a feeling flashed over him that he remembered from when he was a kid - like the world was flying by and the only constants were the car and the people inside it. Usually he hated that feeling. He hated the fact that he couldn't make it stop, that he was always stuck inside the little bubble of his life and separated against his will from everything normal and interesting.

Ever so rarely, though - usually in little moments like these - that feeling was the only thing that actually provided any comfort. In those moments it didn't matter that evil rushed through their lives on an almost daily basis, leaving behind a whirlwind of carnage and chaos that they only hoped they could clean up in their lifetime. It didn't matter that situations and plans changed at a frightening rate or that they always seemed to be one step behind the next evil scheme, because no matter what happened, this would never change.

Him and Dean. In the Impala. Watching the world rush madly by, and _letting_ it.

A small smile played at his lips. Or at least the closest thing to a smile that anyone had seen on him in since he woke up alive in that shack outside of Cold Oak.

He could almost feel Dean smirking, and quickly changed his expression back to one of general annoyance, though he was now unable to keep the teasing tone out of his voice. "Besides, I was never the one who was hard to wake up, Mr. Slept-through-Dad-killing-a- werewolf."

"Hey! I had the flu, and I hadn't slept in two days."

"Yeah, whatever."

"Besides, I'm not the one who just slept through his phone ringing. Twice."

This got Sam's attention, and he dug quickly through his pockets, pulling out the offending device. Sure enough, there were two missed calls, both within a couple minutes of each other.

"Bobby." His mind raced, wondering what could have caused the older hunter to call at this time of night, especially considering they had parted ways in Lincoln barely a day earlier. With a sort of childish hope, he couldn't keep himself from thinking that maybe this had been _the _call. The one where Bobby would have all the answers and fix everything. "Why didn't you wake me up? This could've been important!"

Dean glanced at him again, his face betraying his concern. "Dude, chill. And I tried, remember? Why don't you just call him back, if you're that worried about it?"

Sam had already pressed the redial button. A few seconds later, the other end of the line was picked up, and he let go of the breath he hadn't even realized he'd been holding. "Hey, Bobby, you got something?"

"_As a matter of fact, I do._" The voice on the other end was scratchier than usual, a result of the poor cell signal in the Middle of Nowhere, Utah. "_Been getting a hell of a lot of reports of omens out near Colorado Springs. Unless I'm wrong, something big and nasty is headed there, and fast."_

"Oh." Sam took a deep breath and tried to keep the disappointment out of his voice. It had been a stupid thing to hope for, anyway. "So this is about a job." Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Dean look at him again, then quickly refocused his attention on the call.

"'_Course it's about a job._" There was a pause as Bobby worked out what exactly Sam had been hoping to hear. "_Look, Sam, I'm good, but even I ain't that good. I promise we're gonna find a way to help your brother, but this is going down now, and we gotta deal with it._"

Sam nodded, chastised. "Yeah, Bobby, I know. So what are the details?"

"_Why don't you go ahead and put it on speaker? I don't wanna have to explain this more than once to you two idjits."_

Sam complied, and the rest of the call was spent discussing the gory details of what he was sure was going to be the next major crisis that the Winchester Brothers were willfully pitching themselves into headlong. He jotted down the most important facts, but for the most part, it was more of the usual: crop failures, storms that didn't seem to be entirely natural, and a couple of grisly, unexplained deaths. Just another day at the office.

He stopped paying attention about half way through and did a few calculations in his head. By his estimation they were nearly 500 miles away from Colorado Springs, so they'd have to hurry if they wanted to make it there by morning.

Suppressing a sigh, Sam resigned himself to yet another long night of driving. As Dean and Bobby droned on about omens, demons, and monsters with a taste for human flesh, he turned his head back to the window, watching the rest of the world fly past at an ever-hurrying pace.

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><p><strong>AN - Again, sorry about the confusion! As always, comments and reviews would be lovely.**


	3. Chapter 3

**A/N - Just in case anyone missed the author's note the previous chapter, yes this used to be chapter two, and no, this is not the new material. Sorry about the confusion, etc. Please go read ch. 2 if you haven't yet!**

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><p><strong>-The Next Morning-<strong>

Another day, another mind-numbingly boring briefing.

Col. Jack O'Neill sat at his usual place at the briefing room table, flipping through the thick folder in front of him and absentmindedly drumming his fingers on the hard, laminated wood. He tried to focus on the words, he really did, but his mind and eyes kept drifting toward the 'gate that he and the team should have stepped through exactly 43 minutes and- he checked his watch- 17 seconds ago. Annoyed, he gave up trying to read and slammed the folder shut with a frustrated flick of his wrist. It wasn't like he was going to glean any significant information from that bureaucratic drivel anyways... The force of the action sent a few loose pieces of paper fluttering to the floor, but he didn't bother stooping to pick them up.

Instead, the Colonel glanced around at his teammates, all of whom were seemingly engrossed in the very same folder that had made no sense to him whatsoever. Only Teal'c looked up to acknowledge his little outburst, and he only cocked his eyebrow a bit before resuming his reading. Daniel and Carter didn't even have the decency to look amused.

Finally, since the briefing didn't look like it was going to start any time soon and he could think of nothing better to do, he broke the silence that lay heavily around the table. "I just want to know what was so all-fired important that they had to cancel our mission to P3X-729."

Maj. Carter glanced over the top of the report and shrugged, obviously unconcerned. "Guess something came up. 729 was just a standard recon, anyway. SG-5 can take care of it."

"See," Jack griped, refusing to be consoled, "I'm not sure I like the idea of Hagert getting to go out there and have all the fun."

Teal'c raised his oh-so-expressive eyebrow again, this time without even looking up from the file. "Major Hagert is a capable officer, O'Neill."

"I know he is, Teal'c," he snarked back. "It's just I'd prefer if we did this one ourselves, ya know?"

With the air of a man who has been patient up to a point but finally had enough, Daniel put down his copy of the report and glared at the older man. "What's going on with you, Jack?" he asked, annoyed but genuinely curious. "I don't think I've ever seen you so excited for a, uh, meet and greet before."

"I'm a nice guy, Daniel. I like meeting people."

Talk about leaving himself wide open... There were any number of possible comebacks to that statement, but thankfully the archaeologist didn't use any of them. "Yes, but unless you know something I don't," he responded, answering quite civilly though he did push back a smile. "All reports indicated that 729 is fairly primitive, the MALP didn't find any signs of advanced tech. Any interest in the place would be purely anthropological or, or historical: something I'm sure I would be fascinated by, but you...?"

Jack gave him a look. "It's a beach planet."

This time Carter grinned a little, unable to contain her amusement, and Jack smiled back, aware of how rare it was for her to be truly happy since Martouf. In fact, making her smile had come to be one of his daily goals. _At least I'm better at making her laugh than I am at keeping her safe,_he thought grimly, lapsing back into quiet brooding. He still hadn't forgiven himself for making himself incommunicado during the recent Egypt fiasco. Sam hadn't been seriously injured, but she came out of it with a concussion that he couldn't help but think he might have been able to prevent, had he just been a little less insistent about that stupid fishing trip.

General Hammond strode in from his office then, interrupting his thoughts, and he could tell by the look on the general's face that something was terribly wrong. He and Carter stood automatically, but his mind was focused on running through every possible worst case scenario he could think of on such short notice. The list was endless: extra-planetary viruses, a leak about the program, for all he knew there could be a full-on alien invasion up on the surface. Judging by the worried look in Sam's eyes (and she would know as she had actually read the brief) this wasn't sort of thing they could solve in time to get back to their regularly scheduled programming.

The general stopped next a little tape player at the end of the table. "At ease, people."

Jack sat down, vaguely noting Carter beside him mirroring the action.

"I suppose you're all wondering why I pulled you from the mission this morning."

"It had crossed my mind," Jack admitted casually, stubbornly refusing to be serious despite the gravity of the situation. "Look, isn't there some other team you could send to do... whatever it is that you need done?"

"I'm afraid your beach planet's going to have to wait, Jack," the general deadpanned. The others cracked a smile at this, relieving some of the tension in the room, and Jack dipped his head to hide a smile of his own. Yet another joke at his expense, but he didn't mind, not if it served to lighten the mood a bit.

"At approximately 0200 this morning," General Hammond continued, "Colorado Springs officials received a 911 call from a woman who they later found out had brutally murdered two people, a couple by the names of Carl and Dana Landers. Literally tore them apart." He pushed a few buttons on a handheld remote, dimming the lights in the briefing room and lowering the screen down over the glass. Jack got that sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach telling him that he was about to see something rather unpleasant.

He was right.

"Torn apart" was too tame a term to describe the carnage displayed in the crime scene photos that flashed slowly on the screen. Body parts from what he assumed were two separate bodies were strewn around a small living room, but it was impossible to tell to which body each appendage belonged. Thick gore pooled around the remains, and numerous sprays and smears of blood had stained the formerly white walls a bright red. Disgusted, Jack looked away after the first few slides and saw that the rest of his team was having similar reactions. Both Carter and Daniel looked like they were about to be sick, and while Teal'c's stony expression never wavered, he could see the Jaffa working his jaw furiously, a sure sign that what he saw angered him.

Jack could sympathize. It made him angry, too, and not only at whatever twisted sicko could do something like that. Mainly, he hated not being able to do anything about it, because no matter how horrible the crime, it still came nowhere near to falling in their jurisdiction. That rest of his team knew that, too: he could see it in their faces.

Finally, Daniel voiced what they were all thinking. "Excuse me, Sir," he began, involuntarily shuddering as he tore his eyes away from the screen and focused on the general, "But I guess I fail to see how exactly this is our problem. It's horrible, but-"

General Hammond cut in before he could finish the thought. "The woman claimed that she only killed those people because someone else was controlling her."

Well, that certainly changed things. Jack thrust an angry finger at the photographs. "You're telling me a snake did that?" he seethed.

In response, the general merely gave him a significant look and pressed a button on the tape player. "Take a listen."

_"911, what is the nature of your emergency?"_The operator's calm and official voice could be clearly understood, even over the scratchy tape.

The second voice, belonging to what sounded like a frightened young woman or adolescent girl, was much more difficult to make out. _"Oh my gosh. Oh, my gosh,"_ she practically hyperventilated, _"Please, you have to help me!"_

_"Ma'am, I'm going to need you to calm down. What seems to be the problem?"_

_"They're dead! Both of them-"_ The next few words were unintelligible. _"So much blood... Oh my gosh, I- I think I killed them!"_

_"Can you tell me where you are?"_

_"It's... it's their house. It's, uh, 27 East King."_

_"Police have been dispatched to you, ma'am,"_ the voice informed her, amazingly still quite calm. _"But I'm going to need you to stay on the line until they get there."_

The girl seemed to realize what that would mean, and instantly panicked. _"No! No, no, no, no, I can't, I can't go to jail! Please, please, you have to understand, I didn't do it, it wasn't me!"_

_"Ma'am, did you, or did you not, kill them?"_

_"No! Yes..."_

Sobs choked her voice, and she paused for a moment to catch her breath. _"I- I killed them, but it wasn't me!"  
><em>  
><em>"I don't understand."<em>

_"I saw it happen, all of it... But I didn't do it! It was someone else... Inside me."_

The tape stopped, and Jack found himself frantically trying to process what it was he had just heard. He tried to consider legitimate theories or explanations, or even a valid solution to the problem, but all he felt was a horrible sinking feeling in his chest when he realized that the theory that another snake-head was running around on his planet had just been 99% confirmed. There was always that chance, of course, that this girl was just your run-of-the-mill, everyday crazy suffering from some sort of psychotic break, but really, when had they had they ever had the kind of luck to let that be the case? Unsurprisingly, no else considered this to even be a viable explanation.

Once the significance of this new information had fully sunk in, Daniel began the inevitable discussion of the topic. "I don't get it," he said, gesturing toward the tape. "That sounded real. If it was a goa'uld, why would it leave its host so quickly?"

"Perhaps it is hiding and does not wish to be discovered," Teal'c suggested, and the archeologist seemed to consider the statement.

"Yeah, maybe. But then, why leave the host around to be able to call the police? It doesn't make any sense."

Carter spoke up next. "Maybe that's not actually the host," she suggested, her voice grim.

"You think it's just impersonating her? Trying to trick us."

She shrugged, pushing a strand of her recently-cropped blond hair back behind her ear. "It wouldn't be the first time it's happened," she reminded him quietly.

Daniel nodded slowly, but didn't respond or meet his teammate's eyes. Looking at him, Jack felt a sharp pang of sympathy for the younger man. He didn't even want to imagine what it would be like to find out that the woman he loved was possessed by some evil, malignant... thing, and in less than five years' time Daniel had experienced it not once, but twice. This wasn't just bad luck with women; the younger man was practically a black widow. ...Or whatever one would call the male version thereof, but then again, that would be a cliché. He passed his hands over his face in an effort to stifle a groan. This little debacle was the last thing anyone on his team needed right now. Ideally, they could use some time to relax and unwind, but after the events of their last leave, each had decided that it would be best for the health of everyone involved if they just got back to work. But 'back to work' didn't necessary mean 'back to a happy, guilt-free state of mind.'

That would come with time. If it ever came at all.

When Daniel finally spoke again, he was doing a very good impression of a man who hadn't allowed himself to think about his girlfriend-turned-host. "Then why call the police?" he asked, fully focused again on the case at hand. "It had to know we'd find out eventually."

It is possible," Teal'c suggested, "that it wants us to believe that it has already vacated the girl, so that we will not search for her."

"Well, either way," Jack reminded them, speaking up for the first time since they had heard the tape, "She's the best lead we've got." All this discussion and theorizing was pointless if they let her slip through their fingers while they were busy yammering about motive and whatever else the others were talking about. They should be focused on catching her, first and foremost. The finer points could be sorted out later, once the threat had been eliminated. "I assume she was gone by the time the police got there?" he asked the general, turning the conversation back to more relevant issues.

"She was," he confirmed. "However, a security camera on the building across the street caught this video of her as she left."

Yet another button was pressed, and this time a grainy video recording replaced the graphic photographs, and Jack for one was in no way sad to see them go. The video, however, turned out to be fascinating in its own right, as it showed a few seconds of a girl whom Jack assumed to be the face behind the voice on the tape. She was short and slight, barely more than a kid, with dark eyes and a tangled mass of blond hair hanging limply over her shoulders, but perhaps the most disturbing part of her appearance was her clothes. As far as could be told from the black-and-white recording, she was wearing a light colored sweater over her torn jeans, but it was coated in something much darker, something that was also visible on her neck and on her hands. Something that was presumably blood.

The more he watched the video, though, the more convinced Jack was that Daniel had been right all along. The goa'uld had already left the girl, and what they were seeing was just the host: devoid of the parasite and innocent of any crime, but scarred with the memories of atrocities that she didn't commit. Not for first time, he thought how much better it would be if the hosts were unconscious during the ordeal. Then maybe they could move on with their lives once it was over. Though, granted, it was never truly over for most hosts. This girl was lucky: she would never have to experience the lifetime of horror that most victims of the goa'uld endured.

"She's been identified as Leanne Kerrigan, 19," the general informed them after they had seen the three seconds of video loop a few times, once again interrupting the colonel's spiraling train of thought. "There's a couple of misdemeanors to her name: drug possession, loitering, that sort of thing. Nothing as serious as murder."

Daniel flipped hurriedly through the file that still lay in front of him on the table, apparently remembering something in it that was actually of importance. When he found the appropriate section, he adjusted his glasses and began to read. "According to this," he explained, "This girl had a pretty rough childhood: ran away a lot, evidence of abuse, that sort of thing. But apparently she was always very close to her grandmother, who just so happens to live here in Colorado Springs." Just to make sure he got his point across, the young scientist lifted his head and looked around at the rest of SG-1. "Assuming Leanne is still Leanne... I think I know where we might be able to find her."

"That's good work, people." General Hammond switched the back on the overhead lights and raised the screen, signaling the end of the meeting. "Now go find this goa'uld before it kills again. Dismissed."

Immediately, Daniel and Carter were on their feet, already discussing the situation and moving rapidly toward their repective labs. Teal'c followed behind them, silent as usual, but his stony expression said more than any amount of words.

Jack stood to leave as well, first collecting the papers he had let fall to floor when the meeting first began, but stopped abruptly when he heard General Hammond's voice addressing him. "Oh, and Jack?"

"General?" He turned to face his commanding officer.

"Make sure you catch it this time. After what happened with Ms. Gardner, I don't relish telling the President that we let another one get away."

Jack cringed a little on the inside, though he knew he deserved the reprimand. After all, it was his team, even though he wasn't strictly present at the time. Then again, that was the biggest part of the problem, wasn't it? However, he betrayed none of these thoughts on his face, and kept his voice even as he answered. "Not going to happen, Sir."

"Good. See that it doesn't."

Then the general left, leaving Colonel Jack O'Neill standing in the middle of the spacious briefing room, utterly alone. Several seconds passed before he whispered the requisite response to no one in particular.

"Yes, Sir."

And he meant it. He meant every syllable. Because he had screwed up enough lately, and not just concerning Sarah Gardner and her snake. In the past few months alone he had jeopardized both his and Carter's careers and come within a hair's breadth of committing genocide, not once, but twice. He needed to set things right, and in some small way he felt that completing this mission would do just that.

For that reason alone, he was going personally ensure that this goa'uld was brought to justice, no matter who or what stood in his way.

* * *

><p><strong>AN - Again, I reallly hate myself for all the confusion I'm sure I'm causing with the out-of-order-ness of my updates. Sorry!**


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